Having a full memory card in your digital camera usually means deleting photos you’ve previously taken to make room for new image files. This patented invention allows you to retain the memories you’ve captured without having to delete meaningful pictures to accommodate additional photos. When your camera’s storage fills to a predetermined threshold, previously captured images are compressed, and in some cases recompressed, to a lower quality to make room for additional digital photographs.

IBM inventor Laurence V. Marks, based in Raleigh, NC, earned a patent for this invention, which allows people to capture more photos and memories by fully optimizing their camera’s compression.

Great feature, very useful too.I imagine it would need some UI affordances available on the digital camera. I also hope the images for compression would not be chosen arbitrarily, because this would annoy quite a number of photo enthusiasts 🙂What kind of image compression do you envision using? Do you think there might be the question of compression (read battery life) vs. space available trade off?